Guy and girl are hanging out. Decide to get smashed on gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), a CNS depressant of historical medical use that is currently used as a recreational drug, as a date rape drug, and by bodybuilders looking to boost their endogenous production of human growth hormone. Bodybuilders are so weird.

At some point during their GHB-fueled escapades, eighteen of the girl’s teeth are extracted from her mouth with a pair of pliers. Not one, not two, but eighteen. Molars, incisors, canines, nothing was spared. The paramedics found a friggin’ bowl of teeth when they arrived.

Some college-aged kid got smacked in the face with a golf club, breaking a bunch of stuff that required a fair bit of surgery to repair. Kid shows up a couple of weeks later leaking spinal cord juice from his nose and complaining of headache. He is diagnosed with intracerebral pneumocephalus (IP), which is doctor-speak for having air inside your brain. Back to the OR he goes, where they somehow get the air out of his brain.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, IP is usually the result of being hit really hard in the head with something. Not only do you have to fracture your skull, you also have to tear the dura mater and arachnoid mater. Apparently one of the possible symptoms of IP is hearing a splashing sound akin to liquid sloshing around in your head whenever you move it.

Huge gastric diospyrobezoars are huge solidified clumps of nondigestible food material (e.g. vegetable fibres) that can accumulate in your stomach and can potentially block things up real bad. Apparently Coca-Cola is so friggin’ corrosive (ever seen what happens to a tarnished penny after you leave it in a cup of Coca-Cola overnight?) that drinking a couple of cans of it every day for a few days can effectively dissolve diospyrobezoars. We’re talking about things that stomach acid couldn’t deal with!

Aw yeah. There be fewer things less classy than douching with Coca-Cola after getting boned in an unprotected manner, and that shit won’t even do nothing! RU-486 is where it’s at.

]]>http://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/09/30/soft-drink-science-1/feed/7DIY surgery: For the hardcore, desperate, or just plain mentally illhttp://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/09/10/diy-surgery-for-the-hardcore-d/
http://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/09/10/diy-surgery-for-the-hardcore-d/#commentsWed, 10 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0000http://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/09/10/diy-surgery-for-the-hardcore-d/The closest I’ve come to performing surgery on my self was the time I popped a really big zit behind my ear. Heck, that sucker might have even been a cyst or something. The cases I’ve managed to dig out and list below are, shall we say, way more friggin’ impressive. Oh, and Wikipedia has a neat little entry on self-surgery that is worth a quick read. Personal self-surgery experiences, as always, are welcome in the comments section!

Aw, universities. Engaging undergraduates by bringing beer into the laboratory. No, not hiding six-packs in the walk-in lab fridge (that’s for graduate students), but using Budweiser as a buffer for agarose gel electrophoresis! It works because it contains lots of anions and is subject to at least some quality standards, although there are many drawbacks, such as wasting perfectly good beer on science. And I imagine the apparatus is pretty gross afterwards. Although cleaning up lab stuff is what undergrads are for!

Hey there all of you underage A Good Poop readers! Medical science says that if you want to obtain alcohol, make sure you approach a man who looks like he just turned the legal age, preferably in an urban area.

Okay, firstly, that’s a lot of friggin’ authors. What’d they do, give everyone in the department credit? Anyway, there are apparently two types of earwax, wet and dry. East Asians frequently have dry earwax, while pretty much everyone else tends to have the wet variety. Earwax type is determined by a single little G->A SNP in a region of the ABCC11 gene, which encodes a transport protein that presumably determines the water content of earwax.

There, that’s a more reasonable number of authors. If you are a woman, the type of earwax you have may be associated with the quantity of colostrum that you secrete. Colostrum is a particular type of milk produced by mammals in late pregnancy and a couple of days postpartum. It is nutrient-rich, low in fat, and chock full of immunoglobulins and growth factors (thanks, Wikipedia!).

]]>http://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/08/27/the-earwax-studies/feed/3Now for some real vampireshttp://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/08/24/now-for-some-real-vampires/
http://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/08/24/now-for-some-real-vampires/#commentsSun, 24 Aug 2008 10:00:00 +0000http://scienceblogs.com/agoodpoop/2008/08/24/now-for-some-real-vampires/Check out this article, which does a nice job of summarizing what clinical vampirism is all about. Honestly, all I cared about were the nasty-ass case reports. Highlights include the dude who liked to jerk off to the sight of his own blood and had managed to figure out how to cut himself so as to cause blood to spurt into his mouth, and the pregnant woman who was hospitalized on multiple occasions for vomiting large quantities of her own blood, which she ingested via cuts she made in the base of her tongue. I’ve managed to find a couple of other publications of interest.

John Haigh was a fellow from England who in the late 1940s killed at least six people, drank their blood, and then dissolved their bodies in drums of concentrated sulphuric acid. If you give it enough time, it works. You just have to watch out for incriminating things like dentures and steel plates.

Dude just wanted a break from jail, and figured out that making himself sick by ingesting his own blood was a good way to get to the relative luxury of a hospital room. Based on an accidental viewing of Fear Factor, I suppose that drinking a glass of your own blood wouldn’t be all that bad. You’d just have to chug it and hopefully have something to chase it with.